Papers by Abdullah G Almalki
In Arabic syntax, the label Pism l-faaQil 'Active Participle' (henceforth act.ptcp) was employed ... more In Arabic syntax, the label Pism l-faaQil 'Active Participle' (henceforth act.ptcp) was employed by traditional Arab grammarians as a single categorial designation in terms of morphology. When it comes to functionality, the category of act.ptcps falls into three major types which I designate as: nominal, deverbal and adjectival. Despite the fact that the three above-mentioned types are indistinguishable in terms of morphology and agreement properties, each one exhibits a number of syntactic and semantic features that help differentiate between them. Without taking into consideration such syntactic and semantic properties, it is also problematic to assign each type its appropriate categorial status: nominal, verbal or adjectival. This thesis attempts to provide both a formal and a descriptive account of act.ptcps by investigating the three distinct types of such participles in Hijazi Arabic via: (i) analyzing the syntactic contexts in which they are employed, and (ii) exploring their semantic properties. Different kinds of evidence and arguments are presented, and they weigh for treating nominal and adjectival act.ptcps as NPs and APs, respectively. With respect to deverbal act.ptcps, the types of evidence and arguments for analyzing such participles as non-finite inflectional forms of verbs are too strong to ignore. However, since deverbal act.ptcps differ from regular VPs in that they do not mark tense and person values, they should be syntactically represented as a constituent-structure category of VP ptc .
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Papers by Abdullah G Almalki